Database Migration

DB Best goes well beyond other migration service providers. We take a vested interest in your migration strategy, combining innovation with an accelerated ROI that meets your business needs.

Migration Options

The Database Migration projects are usually part of larger application modernization efforts. DB Best realizes that no two database migration projects look the same. Based on your business needs, we can provide you with a variety of choices including retiring the application, multiple levels of interoperability, just moving the data, or doing a complete “fork-lift” replacement on the application and database. The choice is yours – just let us know how we can help!

Here are the five migration options that we look at when trying to understand your application portfolio.

Five Application and Database Migration Options

Retire the Application

Based on our migration assessment, we can help you identify unneeded applications as the first step to reduce maintenance costs.

Interoperability with the Current Application

In this option, enterprise customers are essentially leaving the current data transaction as is and implementing new capabilities outside of the current data platform. An example of this would be where a customer has an Oracle DB and would build SQL Server Integration, Analysis, Reporting, and Business Intelligence Services outside of the current data-store.

Migrate the data exclusively

DB Best can help you efficiently modernize and migrate your legacy database applications to database technologies such as SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. We can deploy the new database solution in your data center or on clouds platforms like Azure AWS or GCP with minimal to no impact to your business continuity. By utilizing a set of automated tools as well as proven data migration methodologies we can rapidly migrate your schema and data to your target database platform, perform unit and integration testing, and finally execute the necessary application remediation efforts to recreate the application connection points to the new database. Your organization will quickly achieve the performance, scalability, security, and flexibility that are all part of your new data platform.

Rewrite the Application and Optimize for New Database Platform

It is often most cost-effective to rewrite the application to gain the performance and flexibility that you require. DB Best has deep knowledge of all major development tools and frameworks – from the Desktop / Mobile Devices to the Web to the Cloud – we can easily help you modernize your application to take advantage of any new platform.

Rehost the Application

Simply rehosting the current solution on a more cost-effective platform can provide immediate benefits. Whether it’s moving from the mainframe to an x64 platform or rehosting to Microsoft Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform, DB Best can help you achieve the scale, reliability, and lowered TCO you desire.

We are the experts in Database Migration

DB Best goes well beyond standard point-to-point migration service providers – we take a vested interest in your migration strategy, providing innovation, back-end integration, accelerated return on investment, and most importantly an end-to-end solution that meets your business needs.

Starting with a migration complexity assessment, our database engineers can quickly create a strategic migration plan for migrating and transforming your current database assets. Based on this analysis, our team of experts will help you evaluate and implement the most cost-effective solutions for migrating and modernizing your database applications.

Over the last decade, DB Best has created and refined a multi-step program for helping our customer migrate their database assets. Our DB Best 12-step database migration plan allows us to easily develop a project plan using our years of experience in understanding the level of effort of each step, as shown below.

Migration Stages

Within the 12 step migration process, there are various stages that require particular attention. Here are the types of steps we perform within each of these critical stages.

Migration Readiness Stage

Assess database environment, evaluate risks, and create a business case

Identify SMEs and stakeholders

Plan capacity, including hardware and software infrastructure

Define engagement model

Migration Stage

Analyze existing database and design target database to provide the same functionality

Create prioritized migration roadmap based on business objectives

Migrate database objects including tables, views, triggers, PL/SQL packages, Java code, and stored procedures, making any changes to the different ways that other databases implement the functionality vs. the new database engine

Migrate data

Verify database schema and validate that the data was migrated correctly

Extract, Transform, and Load (for ETL Based Apps) Stage

Design and develop ETL packages for parallel data load so that the data being loaded in the previous database is also being loaded into the new database. Furthermore, any data extraction processes from the original database will also need to be replicated within the new target database instance

Test data load performance

Setup and validate security, monitoring and replication functions

Validate data in the target database for technical accuracy and functionality

Application Remediation Stage

Perform integration testing with the applications that were previously consuming data from the original database and make the necessary modification to ensure they work with the new target database instance

Perform user acceptance testing

Training and knowledge transfer

Implement production environment

Post production support

Testing and Validation Strategy

Your business relies on the quality and reliability of your information assets. At DB Best, we utilize a set of automated tools as well as proven methodologies to validate each step of your database migration process.

Database Structure – We will compare configuration on sources and targets as well as data files, table spaces, transaction logs, and all other objects.

Database Integrity Validation – Next we will validate how database objects are maintained on target as compared to the source database, review any and all code that has the ability to modify the data on the database, and test every stored procedure and trigger.

Data Format Confirmation – We will ensure target data type formats match source data type formats and run a series of equivalent queries against both (source/target) to validate results.

Security Validation– The DB Best team will validate that the same privileges and permissions are manually created on the target database. Furthermore, a review of the client application will be done to confirm end-user authentication and permission-level mapping has been maintained.

What makes DB Best Unique

DB Best developed a state-of-the-art database migration technology, which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft SQL Server group in 2005, becoming the foundation for the Microsoft SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) product line. We have a great set of products that we’ve released that also accelerate the migration process including Database Compare Suite, OraMigrator, DB2Migrator, and MySQLMigrator.

Over the last few years, we’ve also been working with the AWS team to suggest improvements to the AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT) to help customers migrate their on-premises OLTP workloads from Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB to the Amazon RDS and Amazon Aurora platforms. We also helped AWS with suggestions to improve data warehouse migrations from Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata, IBM Netezza, Greenplum, and Vertica to Amazon Redshift.

To help customers migrate both OLTP and DW workloads between different targets and sources, we’ve created the DB Best Migration Platform to assist in the automation of our 12-step migration process. This tool integrates the best parts of SSMA, SCT, our products, and internal tools to dramatically reduce the costs and risks associated with database migration projects. Key abilities of the platform include:

Our technology partners

Our experts are trained and certified with our featured technology partners. As a partner, we have access to programs that can provide co-funding resources to help cover some of the migration costs if you are eligible.

Technologies we use for database migrations

Here are several of the technologies that our experts and DB Best use to help estimate the level of effort for your database migration project and perform the automation of the database migration process.